A psychiatrist has called for an ‘emergency’ mental health evaluation of US President Donald Trump. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFPSource:AFP

A PSYCHIATRIST has called for Donald Trump to be physically detained for an “emergency” mental health evaluation, sparking a debate about the professional ethics of “armchair” diagnosis.

Dr Bandy Lee, assistant professor in forensic psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, met with a dozen Democratic politicians last month to “brief” them on Mr Trump’s fitness for office — despite never having met or evaluated the US President.

“Lawmakers were saying they have been very concerned about this, the President’s dangerousness, the dangers that his mental instability poses on the nation,” Dr Lee told CNN last week.

It came as Mr Trump fired off a series of tweets accusing the media of “taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence,” branding himself a “very stable genius”.

In October, Dr Lee co-authored a book called The Dangerous Case Of Donald Trump, a compilation of 27 essays by psychiatrists and mental health experts offering the view that Mr Trump “presents a clear and present danger to our nation”.

Dr Lee joins a chorus of left-wing media outlets and commentators calling for Mr Trump to be removed under Section 4 of the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution, which allows for the Vice President to take over if he and a majority of Cabinet secretaries decide the President is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”.

According to the American Psychiatric Association, it is “unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion” on a public figure “unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorisation for such a statement”.

Dr Bandy Lee. Picture: TwitterSource:Twitter

It’s known as the Goldwater Rule, after former presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. In 1964, Fact magazine published an article titled “The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater”, featuring a poll of psychiatrists in which almost half said Mr Goldwater was psychologically unfit to be president.

Mr Goldwater lost the election but several years later successfully sued the magazine’s publisher for defamation. Current APA president Maria Oquendo has described it as a “large, very public ethical misstep by a significant number of psychiatrists”.

Dr Lee claims she has not broken the Goldwater Rule because “we are not diagnosing him ... we are mainly concerned that an emergency evaluation be done”.

“Those who most require an evaluation are the least likely to submit to one,” she said in an interview with Vox. “That is the reason why in all 50 states we have not only the legal authority, but often the legal obligation, to contain someone even against their will when it’s an emergency.

“This is what we have been calling for with the president based on basic medical standards of care. Surprisingly, many lawyer groups have actually volunteered, on their own, to file for a court paper to ensure that the security staff will co-operate with us.

“But we have declined, since this will really look like a coup, and while we are trying to prevent violence, we don’t wish to incite it through, say, an insurrection.”

This may be a shocking clarification: we actually keep with the Goldwater rule in the book! Every major (some very prominent) psychiatrist--as well as specialist lawyers--agrees we kept with ethical guidelines. Only those who haven't read it disagree!

Dear All, I was told that Twitter would be a good way to respond to mistaken notions, but I have a full-time job (also, "followers" jumping from the 20's to the 600's overnight is a lot to manage). So I am abandoning the idea. Please excuse--it has been nice to try this out!

Her comments have been criticised by some of her peers, however. In a letter published in The New England Journal Of Medicine, Columbia University Department of Psychiatry chairman Dr Jeffrey Lieberman accused Dr Lee and her colleagues of “a misguided and dangerous morality”.

“Although moral and civic imperatives justify citizens speaking out against injustices of government and its leaders, that does not mean that psychiatrists can use their medical credentials to brand elected officials with neuropsychiatric diagnoses without sufficient evidence and appropriate circumstances,” he wrote.

“To do so undermines the profession’s integrity and credibility.

“More than any other medical specialty, psychiatry is vulnerable to being exploited for partisan political purposes and for bypassing due process for establishing guilt, fault and fact.”

“That’s what they did in Russia. That’s what they did in China. That’s what they did in apartheid South Africa,” he told Fox News. “How dare liberals, people on the left, try to undo democracy by accusing a president of being mentally ill without any basis.

“The 25th Amendment doesn’t apply. Everybody knew who Donald Trump was when they elected him ... he hasn’t changed in office and this idea of diagnosing him instead of opposing him politically poses an enormous danger to our democracy.”